Building my new Gaming Rig

So this is about a month late, but I wanted to document the awesomeness of building my new PC with my oldest daughter.

I got sick of waiting for the Ryzen 3000 series to launch, which as it turns out with a month of hindsight, wont’ be happening till July 2019, meaning my build back in late April was a good idea since I was having a really hard time putting off a new build then.

Because price drops occurred, I managed to get an incredible deal on a Ryzen 5 1600 CPU. It’s older, but I paid effectively $50 for it because AMD dropped the price to $120 MSRP, Microcenter (which is about 1 hour away from where I live) had a sale where it was $80 if you bought it in store, and they had a second deal that gives you $30 off the motherboard when you purchase a motherboard and compatible CPU together. 

As such my final specs are:

Ryzen 5 1600

16Gb DDR4 3200 RAM

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

AData M.2 1Tb SSD

Corsair lighting node pro controller, ML120 LED fans, and LED light strips

Thermaltake Core V21 Case

Antec 620W PSU

Building with my daughter

As stated previously the way you interest your young daughter in building gaming PC's is to add RGB. For my new machine I was pulling out all the stops and splurged on a Corsair lighting node pro +  ML 120 RGB Fans plus their LED strips which came with the necessary hub.  I did need to buy some additional fan power cable splitters since my motherboard didn't have enough fan headers. 

Still, I was very excited to do the install with my daughter, even though the assembly over like 4+ hours made her lose some interest towards the end, we did have a good time.

Part of what made things take so long was my being very meticulous about cable management. 

I agonized over the case to pick that had the looks I wanted and didn't cost a ton of money, and the Thermaltake Core V21 delivered. It gives you plenty of room to work with for cable management, though it's still a Micro ATX build so things are going to be tight, especially since I was reusing an older, non-modular power supply I already owned to save a few bucks. 

Amazingly the Core V21 lets you rotate the entirety of the case, which I ended up doing since I wanted the window to give a traditional shot, rather than the standard mounting of the Core V21 which would have the window largely showing just the video card. 

In the end I think I ended up with a very nice, clean build. Note that I have since read the motherboard manual correctly and put the DIMM's for the RAM into the proper slots to get dual channel.

Gaming

So it's been a month since the build was completed and I've had to fall back to mostly PC gaming in order to spend enough time at home to help with the kids. What have I played?

Overwatch is my standard game to play when my buddies are online as it's the one game we all own and can enjoy together. That's kind of like our bread and butter game that I'll hop on, but it isn't what has made me really enjoy the new machine.

I finished Wolfenstein New Order on the new machine and I appreciated being able to turn everything to Ultra and sit above 100 FPS. It was enjoyable on my old machine, though certainly smoother on the new one. 

I then oddly moved towards playing an older game, Dishonored. It certainly wasn't stressing my system, but I played through it with my wife watching my play through while doing some hobby of her own once our daughters were put to bed at night. I end up mirroring my display to the TV right next to the PC and put the sound through there to make it so she can more easily see what's going on. 

I did a stealth/non-leathal play through of the game and enjoyed the low-chaos ending.

Once that was finished, I used my Steam gift cards I had laying around and purchased Rage 2 on release. A bit of a splurge, but I wanted a new Doom-like FPS that I could crank to max settings and enjoy high end graphics that the machine could deliver. 

Rage 2 definitely does that. I can crank the settings to max and it's gorgeous, and the gameplay is great. The more you play and upgrade your stuff the more fun and outrageous the game becomes. I've been enjoying more and more as I play and it's been a nice stress reliever after rough days at work or when my toddler decides she wants to stand in a toilet to "swim". 

Spring sales rolled around and I picked up Dishonored 2 for $20 on Humble-Bundle which I've started playing through with my wife. I'm playing Emily on low-Chaos again, though I'm not being too strict about not killing anyone. The game is nice in that it doesn't force you into high chaos for killing guards who are "bad". It's also nice that you can get caught and be forced to fight but still have an option for non-lethal take downs if you block and time the take down just right. 

I'm very much looking forward to Doom Eternal's release and may replay Doom 2016 once I'm done Rage 2. Maybe I'll get Wolfenstein New Colossus if it's on sale, though I definitely am liking Rage/Doom more than the Wolfenstein games. It's still fun either way.